The Blog formerly known as "Flight of the Pigeon". A lot of Web, Plone and Python, with other occasional topics such as education and running.

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Will Cyn.in clear the Knowledge Bottleneck?

We've been suffering from "knowledge bottleneck", where one person in the organization knows what's up about something, but others don't. This isn't the first time we've identified the problem or tried to fix it. As a result I'm very wary nowadays about throwing new techniques and technologies at problems.

A Simple Plan

So here's my new plan:

Agree on the problem being solved

Gauge expectations and agree on what would be considered a "successful fix"

Try it out the "solution" for an agreed period of time.

Review and decide whether we're closer to a "successful fix", if so, continue.

Expectations

I just had a quick IM discussion about using Cyn.in to solve some of our "knowledge sharing" issues.

We're all, pretty much frustrated with our current wiki solution (we're using trac and cluemapper). They are great tools for managing source code in a sensible manner, but the wiki system makes it hard to search for information across projects. Enter Cyn.in which bills itself as "collaboration software that inter-connects your people with each other and their collective knowledge..."

So far, and I'm sure this will change with more feedback, these are some of the ways that we think Cyn.in could benefit us:

Improve manageablity – make it easy to document and monitor multiple projects)

Improve "handoverability" – make it easy to pass a project to a coworker)

Improve transparency - making it easy to subscribe to feeds so a user can easily get relevant updates in their favourite feedreader

Improve discoverablity – it should be easy to find information – The ultimate test: - Can it work in this scenario?

I know the name of the contact that we made but don't know what the project is called.